I’ve been to several of CFAR’s classes throughout the last 2 years (some test classes and some more ‘official’ ones) and I feel like it wasn’t a good use of my time. Spend your money elsewhere.
cursed
On CFAR’s front page:
In the process, we’re breaking new ground in studying the long-term effects of rationality training on life outcomes using randomized controlled trials.
Despite CFAR’s 2-3 year existence (probably longer informally, as well) they have yet to publish a single paper on these “randomized controlled trials”. I would advise not donating until they make good on their claims.
edit: I’ve also made some notes on CFAR and their use of science as an applause light in previous comments.
Do you think it was unhelpful because you already had a high level of knowledge on the topics they were teaching and thus didn’t have much to learn or because the actual techniques were not effective?
I don’t believe I had a high level of knowledge on the specific topics they were teaching (behavior change, and the like). I did study some cognitive science in my undergraduate years, and I take issue with the ‘science’.
Do you think your experience was typical?
I believe that the majority of people don’t get much, if anything, from CFAR’s rationality lessons. However, after the lesson, people may be slightly more motivated to accomplish whatever they want to, in the short term just because they’ve paid money towards a course to increase their motivation.
How useful do you think it would be to an average person?
There was one average person at one of the workshops I attended. e.g. never read LessWrong/other rationality material. He fell asleep a few hours into the lesson, I don’t think he gained much from attending. I’m hesitant to extrapolate, because I’m not exactly sure what an average person entails.
An average rationalist?
I haven’t met many rationalists, but would believe they wouldn’t benefit much/at all.
Cryonics ideas in practice:
“The technique involves replacing all of a patient’s blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. “If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can’t bring them back to life. But if they’re dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,” says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.”
With Sam Altman (CEO of YCombinator) talking so much about AI safety and risk over the last 2-3 months, I was so sure that he was working out a deal to fund MIRI. I wonder why they decided to create their own non-profit instead.
Although on second thought, they’re aiming for different goals. While MIRI is focused on safety once strong AI occurs, OpenAI is trying to actually speed up the research of strong AI.
You can buy nasal sprays over-the-counter, while I can’t think of a single injectable medicine that you can buy legally without a prescription. I don’t think the “stab people in the arm” argument is very strong.
Would you like to make a friendly wager? (Either Dentin, or johnswentworth, or anyone else making their own vaccine). We can do 50⁄50, since its in between our estimates. If you have two positive back-to-back anti-body tests within 2 months, you win (assuming you don’t actually contract covid, which I trust you’ll be honest here). If not, I win. To start off with, I’m willing to put down $100, but happy to go up or down.
- 4 Mar 2021 10:19 UTC; 13 points) 's comment on RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results by (
- 4 Mar 2021 5:12 UTC; -11 points) 's comment on RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results by (
Props to you for taking action here, this is some impressive stuff.
That being said, I’m extremely skeptical that this will work, my belief is that there’s a 1-2% chance here that you’ve effectively immunized yourself from COVID.
What do you believe is the probability of success?
Why are established pharmaceutical companies spending billions on research and using complex mRNA vaccines when simply creating some peptides and adding it to a solution works just as well?
- 4 Mar 2021 10:19 UTC; 13 points) 's comment on RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results by (
- 4 Mar 2021 5:12 UTC; -11 points) 's comment on RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results by (
Those who are currently using Anki on a mostly daily or weekly basis: what are you studying/ankifying?
To start: I’m working on memorizing programming languages and frameworks because I have trouble remembering parameters and method names.
I haven’t really looked into it, but there was an odd message that he left in his IAMA in regards to Girardian philosophy: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_technology_entrepreneur_and_investor/ckfn9rj?context=3 . Would love for anyone who knows more to jump in.
Thinking about a quote from HPMOR (the podcast is quite good, if anyone was interested):
But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human’s metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn’t happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.
And today’s scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.
...
It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other—an evolutionary arms race without limit—had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.
Besides the quoted “Chimpanzee Politics” are there any other references to this hypothesis? I’ve tried Googling around for 5 minutes and I couldn’t find anything.
Edit: seems like I was looking using the wrong keywords: Wikipedia seems to have a small paragraph on evolution of human brain due to competitive social behavior, but I’d still like to see if anyone else had any articles on the matter.
The link for Feynman’s Why Questions is broken.
Vaccines that are brought to clinical trials have a 33.4% approval rate, which seems like a reasonable estimate of the chances that this vaccine works if executed correctly.
I don’t follow. Don’t vaccines have trials on cells, mice, primates, before clinical? So unless radvac has also done similar testing, this 33.4% isn’t comparable.
Do you mind revealing what Shane’s timelines are, and the probability that he thinks that he’ll play a role in AGI?
Is there a listing of Yvain/slatestarcodex’s fiction? I just finished reading The Study of Anglophysics, and I want more.
I’m interested in learning pure math, starting from precalculus. Can anyone give advise on what textbooks I should use? Here’s my current list (a lot of these textbooks were taken from the MIRI and LW’s best textbook list):
Calculus for Science and Engineering
Calculus—Spivak
Linear Algebra and its Applications—Strang
Linear Algebra Done Right
Div, Grad, Curl and All That (Vector calc)
Fundamentals of Number Theory—LeVeque
Basic Set Theory
Discrete Mathematics and its Applications
Introduction to Mathematical Logic
Abstract Algebra—Dummit
I’m well versed in simple calculus, going back to precalc to fill gaps I may have in my knowledge. I feel like I’m missing some major gaps in knowledge jumping from the undergrad to graduate level. Do any math PhDs have any advice?
Thanks!
As noted in http://lesswrong.com/lw/lfg/cfar_in_2014_continuing_to_climb_out_of_the/, they haven’t even started yet. Also, just replicating a study they cite in their rationality training would be a good step.
One of the future premises of CFAR is that we can eventually apply the full scientific method to the problem of constructing a rationality curriculum (by measuring variations, counting things, re-testing, etc.) -- we aim to eventually be an evidence-based organization. In our present state this continues to be a lot harder than we would like; and our 2014 workshop, for example, was done via crude “what do you feel you learnt?” surveys and our own gut impressions.
Personally, I prefer more produced podcasts, in the style of Serial, Freakonomics, etc, because very few people are good interviewees. I would like to hear more if you could improve the microphone quality—I couldn’t distinguish some words, even upon relistening. I’m sure the person behind HPMOR Podcast would offer more tips if you contacted him.
What are the prerequisites for reading this? What level of mathematics and background of classical physics?
I don’t know if you’re purposely being antagonistic, but I’ll respond because I try to assume that people are arguing in good faith.
You predict nothing of that sort in the linked comment. The antibody test being negative is a distinct event from immunization.
The first linked comment I said that “there’s a 1-2% chance here that you’ve effectively immunized yourself from COVID.”. In the second linked comment, I clarified that an anti-body test would be the the predictor of immunization.
I picked 50% because of the comment:
My rough guess is that there’s a 75% probability of effectively full immunity
Regardless of people accepting or rejecting my bet, my prediction came true. For a community supposedly dedicated to rationalism and prediction markets, a −8 downvote on my comment seems a lot like groupthink, trying to push down dissenters.
Too bad that the LW community falls victim to obvious snake oil and herd mentality. I wish it weren’t so.
I didn’t learn anything useful. They taught, among other things, “here’s what you should do to gain better habits”. Tried it and didn’t work on me. YMMV.
One thing that really irked me was the use of cognitive ‘science’ to justify their lessons ‘scientifically’. They did this by using big scientific words that felt like they were trying to attempt to impress us with their knowledge. (I’m not sure what the correct phrase is—the words weren’t constraining beliefs? don’t pay rent? they could have made up scientific sounding words and it would have had the same effect.)
Also, they had a giant 1-2 page listing of citations that they used to back up their lessons. I asked some extremely basic questions about papers and articles I’ve previously read on the list and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
ETA: I might go to another class in a year or two to see if they’ve improved. Not convinced that they’re worth donating money towards at this moment.